The Forbidden Village

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, right? Wrong, very wrong. Where I come from it means to run for your life, The Watch are coming to get you. When they got a hold of you, which they always did, you were never seen or heard from again. Or at least that’s what the stories say. When people have tried to tell the outside world about what was going on inside our town, no one would believe us, and those who did were met with some form of tragic accident. That’s when people panicked and tried to leave. That’s also when we found out what would happen if anyone of us ever tried to move.

I had overheard these stories when I was younger. The town tells the story to the older kids to get them to behave properly, but the stories are still incredibly scary. What I had heard was that if anyone ventured too close to the border of the town, the person’s mutilated corpse could be found in the ditch by the Now Leaving sign.

However, The Watch has not attacked us for nearly 100 years, they’ve practically faded to myth and legend. Until today that is. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the first abduction. This kidnapping happened an incredibly long time ago, but we have managed to keep records of most of the people that were taken by The Watch. I have no idea why we were keeping track; that’s just kind of how it turned out.

No one had the slightest clue as to who or what was taking all of the townspeople. The only thing that the town knew was that people would disappear every 10 to 20 years. Usually, only one person would go missing, so it didn’t draw all that much attention, but when two or three people began to disappear at a time, the townspeople started to take notice.

The local police were utterly astounded and bewildered by the disappearances of so many people. But there was little that they could do with the limited technology of the 1600s. All that they had managed to do was keep track of all the missing people. The police didn’t figure out who was taking the people until the mid-1800s. That’s when The Watch was spotted.

They were caught trying to take a young lady who was just coming out of her house. They looked human from afar, but the stories told of gruesome features and demonic presences. Direct descendants from the devil himself. However, it seemed a little farfetched to me. I mean seriously. People who look like devil spawn? You’ve got to be kidding me.

After The Watch had been spotted, they weren’t as careful with their kidnappings. In fact, I think that more people went missing than before they had found out who The Watch were. But then in the 1900s, the crimes had suddenly stopped, and there hasn’t been one since. So, the town had just thought that they had either died off, left or were killed off.

This is about the time where I come in. My name is Kristine, and I wasn’t born the way that normal human girls are supposed to be. My family had found me in a ditch in a little wooden basket, yeah, I know it’s an original way to be found. I was born with a mutated gene that gave me the ability to heal people and other living objects. How did I know about this uncanny ability you may ask? Well, my mother was supposed to have died in a car crash from taking me home for the first time, but her wounds miraculously began to fade as she was holding me in her arms.

No one understood how my mother had made it out of the car crash alive or what she had even hit in the first place considering that there wasn’t any debris at the scene. Weird, right? And if that isn’t proof enough then listen to this. A while back a friend of mine and I were walking across a road to get back to her house from the park when a drunk driver whipped around the corner and hit my friend. The person just kept on driving as if they didn’t even notice that they had just hit someone, and I was staring in shock at my friend’s mangled body. I ran over to her to check to see if she was still alive. I was freaking out.

I was ten years old, and my friend was dying right in front of my eyes. Neither of us had phones since both of our parents didn’t see the need for them, and no one else was around. It was just us. I grabbed her hand not knowing what else to do and tried to hold back my tears. I had to be strong for her. She was tearing up and crying. She didn’t want to die. Her blood was spreading out from her body like a peacock’s tail.

I closed my eyes as I held her hand and prayed that someone would find us and that she would be okay. But as I concentrated I started to get fatigued. The last thing I remember was my face hitting the pavement; then everything went black. I awoke in the hospital with my family asleep in the chairs beside my bed.

It turns out that I was in a coma for three days. And when I asked about my friend, my parents said that she just had a fractured arm and a small amount of blood loss. But the doctors had found that she had no open wounds anywhere on her body. It made them wonder how she had lost the blood in the first place. Only my family, and me after they explained it to me, knew what had happened that day.

No one was supposed to know about my ability, so I was forced to practice it in secret. I found out through my practice that if I focused hard on my hand over the top of the wound or even on the edges of the wound, it healed faster and took less energy. I learned how to treat everything but poisons with my powers. I studied remedies of every kind of poison that I could get my hands on and some that I had to figure out for myself. I also studied the symptoms of a variety of poisons and illnesses.

And then I started school.